Our Beryl takes on the documentary arts in Dreams and Desires -- Family Ties. © Beryl Productions International Ltd.

Dreams and Desires -- Family Ties
If ever there could be a “not-CGI” look, it’s got to be the drawing style of Joanna Quinn. Inspired by equal parts Goya, Daumier and Toulouse-Lautrec, she searches for the line in her figures and then leaves the search on the screen, showing her work and delivering a lot of squiggly rough magic in the process. Quinn and her producing partner Les Mills have written and animated a number of short-format favorites over the last two decades, including Britannia, Elles and Famous Fred, as well as popular ad campaigns for Charmin and Nips. But they’re probably best known for the Beryl shorts that gave their company, Beryl Productions, its name. First seen in Girls Night Out in 1986, Beryl, a Welsh factory worker, reappeared in Body Beautiful in 1990 and is finally back in Quinn’s latest short, Dreams and Desires -- Family Ties.

Beryl’s a big working-class girl, big-hearted and tart of tongue, and she’s had various factory jobs in her part of Wales as the various factories have come and gone from the real Welsh landscape more than 20 years. Now her sister living in America has sent her a Digicam, and she’s determined to channel her latent artistic energies as a documentarian. The focus of Family Ties is her friend’s wedding, which she films from start to finish and beyond. As far as Beryl is concerned, it’s an all-day train wreck, and most of the derailments are her fault.

The whole short plays out in the first person, as Beryl uses the Digicam both to document the day’s events and to function as her own portable confession booth. After a brief introduction she heads to the bride’s house, where the bride is trying to squeeze into an impossibly small red dress. Despite attentions from her friends and her Mum, though, after pulling and pulling, all they get is a broken zipper. Meanwhile the bride’s dog Digger has irritable bowels and is crapping in the living room corner.

They all board a limo to the service, with Beryl in the front, and the bride and her father -- and Digger, now diapered -- in the backseat. Later at the church, Beryl stands at the rear to capture the ceremony, watching the bride’s father take the bride up the aisle with a tiny veil that entirely fails to reach down her back and cover the open zipper going straight down to her purple-thong undies. To bring some spice to her camerawork, Beryl recruits a man in a wheelchair to hold tight to the camera as Beryl gives him a nudge down the aisle for a tracking shot. Unfortunately he can’t stop, and the air fills with screams, crashes, a flying priest, flying undies and a perilously airborne crucifix.

Cut to an aerial view, as Beryl is banished to the choir loft. She needs to relax, so a sympathetic friend passes her an interesting cigarette. In the hallucination that follows, Beryl dances at the altar with Digger as cherubs frolic in the heavens above. Later, she’s back down to Earth and drowning her remorse in a lot of champagne and red wine at the reception, when she decides to get something more candid by attaching the Digicam to Digger and letting him roam the reception. He doesn’t disappoint; he captures a couple having sex in the bathroom, and then gets some primo footage of himself jumping on the wedding cake, which collapses.

Family Ties is as big a blast as the Beryl shorts that came before it; the character drawings burst with life, the humor is earthy and flowing in from all directions at once. The voice talent is impeccable, particularly the indefatigable Menna Trussler who’s once again performing as Beryl. There’s actually almost too much action. Beryl moves from one disaster to the next with barely a moment to breathe. And Quinn and Mills more or less agree; Les says it, “could have been at least three minutes longer” and left us with a little more stasis to help with the comic beats, but as they ran out of time and money a bit of compromise was in order just to get the thing out of the gate at all. And on DVD, as this short must eventually find itself, with repeated viewings all those not brought up in the U.K. will be able to navigate those wonderful west-country accents, catch all the lines and just luxuriate in the sight of Beryl strapping a camera to a dog’s back and crying out “Kinopravda!”

The 10-minute film is the first part of what Quinn and Mills hope will be a five-part Dreams and Desires series, with part two to be called Beverly Thrills.